Measuring New Zealand's GDP 1865-1933: A cointegration-based approach

Official and semi-official estimates of New Zealand's national income are a vailable on an annual basis for the years since 1932. Retrospective, non-of ficial, estimates are available from 1859. Chiefly these are constructed fo llowing Doblin's (1951) pioneering use of money stock data, velocity, and t he implications of the Quantity Theory of Money, and include the estimates of Hawke (1975), Rankin (1992) and Cashin (1995). This paper estimates New Zealand real GDP per capita with monetary data usi ng valid, intervention-free, cointegration methods. The new measures avoid the ad hoc adjustments found in Rankin (1992), yet unlike Cashin (1995), th ey incoporate specific New Zealand monetary features. The new time series c onform well with independent benchmarks and the historiography of the pre-1 914 period. Alternatively, they suggest an interpretation of New Zealand's growth experience for years around World War One which differs from that of Australia, and from the findings of Rankin (1992) and Cashin (1995).